About Author

With a focus on open source and digital rights, Simon is a director of the UK's Open Rights Group and president of the Open Source Initiative. He is also managing director of UK consulting firm Meshed Insights Ltd.

Filtering "pornography" without any way to define what it is can only harm our society, and seeing it proposed is yet another reminder that the "Ecclesiastes Principle" still holds true.

Watching an interesting TED Talk by Amber Case,
I was reminded of a long-term guiding principle I have followed when
faced with novelty. It's an old idea that's embedded deep in many
traditions. The pithy summary says "there's nothing new under the sun", and it's
found notably in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes that's shared by
several world religions.

Of course, we all want to believe we live in
the Age of New, and indeed there's much happening every year that's
breathtaking and marvellous. But the "Ecclesiastes Principle" still
holds; if you think something breaks it, you probably need to think
deeper.

I don't mean there's no innovation. Obviously human minds
are continually and brilliantly rearranging the world. But "all rivers
run to the sea, yet the sea is never full". We allow ourselves to let that brilliance dazzle us into thinking the novelty we're seeing must require different rules for the people creating and using it. Remember in the early days of blogging when each
person who lost their job by breaking their employment terms blamed
their blog and not their behaviour?

You can see this vanity
most clearly in the thinking that's going into legislation in the face
of technology. We keep seeing the implication that society needs protecting
from new technology and that new laws are needed to do it. But that
outlook is false. In all cases, technology is a tool in the lives of
people. It's the people who do the good and bad things with the
technology, and the people who need regulating. So it has been since the story of Cain and Abel was written.

Spotting Bad Law

It may be that old law allows human behaviour to use technology in a harmful way without recourse. What should happen is adjustment of that existing law to close the loopholes. Instead, new laws are
created that have the new technology specifically in mind. This is a
fruitless approach. In earlier ages, the law rested on a
hub-and-spoke topology of society where control points existed and could thus be regulated. Today's technology rests on a meshed topology where restrictions are
damage that gets routed around.

Laws that try to address the technology -
"three-strikes" rules to cut people off the internet, pornography filtering
and their like - may sometimes have a temporary effect that offers legislators a publicity moment. But in the medium term laws that are specific to a technology
get routed-around. Worse, in the long term they become anachronisms that
are abused.

You can spot these laws fairly easily. They focus on technology, creating broad powers that have little or no recourse and are
guided by ill-defined or open-ended rules. They are often created in a hurry. They often seem to have been drafted by special-interest lobbyists.

Filtering Culture

With
this in mind, I'm saddened and concerned by the moves the UK government
is making to try to introduce "pornography filtering" in order to
"protect children". I can't help suspecting these laws are being drafted
with the help of "experts" supplied by an interest group. As Cory Doctorow so eloquently observes in his brilliant discussion of the subject,
this is misguided populism that will put broad powers with no recourse
into the hands of future opponents of freedom an innovation. Meanwhile,
it's unlikely to help anyone:

What that means is that
parents who opt their families into the scheme are in for a nasty shock:
first, when their kids (inevitably) discover the vast quantities of
actual, no-fooling pornography that the filter misses; and second, when
they themselves discover that their internet is now substantially
broken, with equally vast swathes of legitimate material blocked.

The proposals rely on closed software and closed blacklists - they have to, since "pornography" and "harmful" have no useful definition and are open-endedly subjective. My experiences of these systems match Cory's; they block stuff that's not a risk to anyone much and let through stuff that is. Much worse: there's no realistic way for me to fix errors because of the closed and proprietary systems used and the lack of accountability. In these days of a meshed society, the very mention of closed technology - instead of the invocation of open source and open data - should be enough to signal a problem.

These
days I expect new law about technology to be bad law. Technology merely
provides ways to allow people to express their personalities,
relationships and ambitions. When the law is wrong, it usually needs
refactoring to allow for the people - who are still largely the same -
to be regulated.

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